Cloud Architecture
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Where the money goes when users upload photos, and a GCS upload-and-variants pipeline that lets a CDN serve small, immutable files for years.
16 min
Topic 01 / 08 · 03 articles
Cloud Architecture
About this topic
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Most cloud architecture advice is written for companies with a platform team and a generous budget. The articles here are written for the opposite situation: a small team, a real product, and a bill that has to make sense every month.
I focus on Google Cloud because it is where I run production systems, but the reasoning travels. Each piece starts from a concrete constraint — a latency target, a traffic shape, a cost ceiling — and works through the options until one of them is clearly the right trade-off. You will find serverless compute and its cold starts, scale-to-zero as a deliberate budget strategy, media delivery through CDNs, event-driven designs, and the hidden fixed costs that make a “free tier” architecture surprisingly expensive.
Where numbers appear, they are either measured or clearly labelled as illustrative, and pricing always links to the official page so you can check it against today’s rates.
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DateArticleRead
· 14 min
Cloud Run cold starts: a field guide
What a Cloud Run cold start is made of, how to measure each phase, and which fixes, and which min-instances bill, actually shorten it for your service.
14 min
· 13 min
Scale-to-zero as a budget strategy
Early-stage systems rarely go broke on traffic. They bleed money while idle. How to design a GCP stack whose cost stays near zero when no one is using it.
13 min
· 16 min
Serving user images without burning money
Where the money goes when users upload photos, and a GCS upload-and-variants pipeline that lets a CDN serve small, immutable files for years.
16 min